Facing Down Our Future (or Not)

I hate to keep using the excuse for not keeping up, but I've been very busy at work for quite some time, and I'm not finding the time to browse the world's newspapers (and on the Internet, news sites) as I might like. So it may be my error that I'm not seeing all the coverage of the myriad problems facing us these days. We get some amount of some things getting better in Iraq, but not as much of some political things not getting better there. We hear about the sub-prime mortgage losses and how they're affecting Wall Street, but except for vague hints, we don't look at the looming problem they represent. We see the Prez do his best to knock down the constitutional restraints from establishing an imperial presidency, but we have to catch the implications of those moves ourselves.

As I said, maybe I'm missing coverage of all this in the mainstream media (and please point me in the direction where I can find it if I am), but the whole United States seems to be in massive case of denial. We don't want to accept any of the problems facing us. This can be seen most obviously in the presidential primary races, where hardly any of our real problems are being addressed. Does Hillary have a plan to rollback the imperial presidency? Why should she? How many presidents have we have who've said, "I have plenty of power--we need to strengthen the legislative branch again"? (There actually have been a couple who've been concerned about such things.) Although I might expect Obama or John Edwards to be a bit more willing to explore the issue, I haven't heard any firm comments on it from either one. Certainly no one on the Republican side (except Ron Paul) would want to limit the executive--they just think that the advancements Cheney and the Bush administration have made are a good foundation they can add on to.

The economy should be a major concern these days, but at best it gets some attention in the subtext of other sound bites or actions. Losses from the sub-prime fallout continue to climb, but other than express some sympathy for those who've lost (or will lose) their homes, nobody's got much of anything to say on the matter. Even more, there appear to be no consequences for those who bear a great deal of responsibility for all this. Here's some of Paul Krugman yesterday:

Bad housing investments are crippling financial institutions that play a crucial role in providing credit, by wiping out much of their capital. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs suggested that housing-related losses could force banks and other players to cut lending by as much as $2 trillion — enough to trigger a nasty recession, if it happens quickly.

Beyond that, there's a pervasive loss of trust, which is like sand thrown in the gears of the financial system. The crisis of confidence is plainly visible in the market data: there's an almost unprecedented spread between the very low interest rates investors are willing to accept on U.S. government debt — which is still considered safe — and the much higher interest rates at which banks are willing to lend to each other.

How did things go so wrong?

Part of the answer is that people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.

But another part of the answer lies in what hasn't happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven't been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.

In other words, they've had no incentive to do anything other than exactly what they've done. And the presidential candidates don't especially have an incentive to tackle the tough issues (and every incentive not to). We're never going to get anywhere until we start looking at out problems. But who wants to waste time with that, right?